Older, inner city neighborhoods, like those in East Dallas and Lakewood, will benefit from the budget passed by the city council for this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. The smaller budget was amended by other council members and myself to place more emphasis on services without raising the tax rate, as had been recommended.
A group of City Council members worked together to make relatively small, but vitally important adjustments in the budget. About $11 million in spending priorities were changed out of a total city budget of $1.17 billion. The changes we insisted upon will benefit our neighborhoods. The changes include:
• The police department’s Coordinated Neighborhood Oriented Policing program will expand to two patrol bureaus in the next 18 months, and all patrol bureaus within three years. Now it operates in the Southeast Patrol Bureau. The program assigns “beat officers” to specific neighborhoods. The officers respond to emergencies only in their assigned neighborhood and work with the community and other city departments to solve problems.
• A fourth hearing panel of citizen volunteers was added to the Urban Rehabilitation Standards Board for one year to handle the backlog of code violation cases. We also increased funding to our municipal courts to cut the waiting time for code violation cases to be enforced in court. The city will have more money to mow and clean vacant lots and a repeat offender program will target chronic code violators. The council voted to fund more demolition of substandard structures in the city. And increased enforcement will cut down on illegal parking in yards and other unimproved surfaces.
• Increased funds will double the activity of the police department’s Violent Crime Task Force, which has been successful in East Dallas. The task force puts more officers in the field to attack some of the worst crime problems in our neighborhoods.
• Two more mobile police storefronts will be purchased. More officers will staff the big, converted campers that are used as roving police headquarters to target crime problems as they crop up.
• To round up stray animals from our street, more officers will be added to the animal control program.
• Neighborhoods with approved applications for speed bumps will see them completed this year. Money was added to the budget to fulfill all 32 neighborhood requests for road humps on their streets to cut down on speeding cars and discourage increased traffic. At our previous rate of spending, it would have taken two decades to build the road humps.
• Proposed cuts in recreation center maintenance, Parks and Recreation Department activity vans and services for senior citizens were restored.
• A proposed 2.5 percent property tax rate increase was eliminated. Council members and our staff worked together to find enough budget cuts and program delays to avoid a tax increase. However, we reluctantly increased water and sanitation fees.
We also approved many important programs that former City Manager Jan Hart recommended. The emergency medical service will be expanded, with more ambulances added. The new Mountain Creek branch library will open and a new branch at Skillman and Southwestern in East Dallas will be built. The Dallas Convention Center will nearly double in size when the new expansion opens, which will increase our city’s convention and tourism business.
In the environmental area, 50 more vehicles will be converted to use compressed natural gas. A composting program at the landfill will expand. A newspaper and office paper recycling program will begin. And a program to safely dispose household hazardous waste will be developed.
The council held the line on our gang program and AIDS services. Cultural affairs funding was essentially maintained, with added funds for the city’s share of operating the new Hamon Wing of the Dallas Museum of Art, which was built with private money and donated to the city. Our city employees also received a deserved three percent pay increase.
This year’s budget was difficult to balance. It is the ninth consecutive budget to include cuts in city departments except those providing public safety. After having three town hall meetings with hundreds of District 14 constituents, I believe my votes reflected the priorities of those of us who live in Dallas’ older neighborhoods near downtown.
Times are getting better and we are seeing the start of a fiscal recovery for our city. We can look forward to a slowly improving economic climate that will make future city budgets easier to balance. Our job in the next few years is to reinvest in our urban infrastructure and shore up city services that enhance our quality of life.
